 Welcome to Monet Cafe. I'm artist Susan Jenkins. This should be a really fun and Educational tutorial. I'm gonna teach you how to get some really neat painterly effects by using soft pastel With alcohol. If you haven't subscribed, I really hope you will. It's a lot of fun here And if you would like to support this channel, I would so appreciate that. It's only $5 a month It helps to keep free videos coming to this channel help me get the equipment that I need and plus my patrons get some extra Content we have a lot of fun in this tutorial. I will be using a surface. I love it's called pastel matte It comes in various colors. I'm gonna talk about why I love the white surface. It works great with alcohol Yes, that's just regular drugstore alcohol. So that's a sneak peek as to what's coming and here we go The reference image I'll be using is from unsplash.com by Deva Williamson and look at that. She is an American cake decorating magazine columnist No wonder she has such gorgeous photos of sweet treats And I already saw a lot more that I would like to paint. Now the reason I'm doing Subject matter a little different than some of the landscape paintings I typically do is it is market theme in Monet Cafe that means things like a farmer's market a produce stand a bakery like this and So it's a lot of fun and I think it stretches us artistically. All right. Let's paint these yummy cupcakes Here I have my white pastel matte taped to my easel now I'm using a tabletop easel here and I just have some artist tape holding my paper down. This is a Prismacolor new pastel It's a little harder than most soft pastels It made for a neat sketching implement because there was a lot of pink in the painting I decided to use this color that was kind of a darker pink and all I'm doing now now I am speeding this section up I will have Definitely sections that are real-time and much slower, but I actually Decided to change the composition a little bit from the reference image And I'll be sharing more about that when I finish this sketch But just so you know I cropped the original image if you go on unsplash.com and you find this I made it a square I basically got rid of the top part and the Measurement of the paper I'm using on my easel is eight and a half inches by eight and a half inches I liked in the reference image how that front cupcake wasn't quite center It was a little to the left and I realized mine was a little bit center But I feel like with the rest of the composition it worked out Okay, and I felt that the fork was a needed element It has a compositional lead-in to it and I thought it just really added to it So now you can see I've added some different spacing of the cupcakes and if you're a patron of mine I will be providing you guys with one of the images I took Kind of in the initial stages of this and it should help you work your composition now I will be using almost exclusively this set of unison pastels. This is the 120 120 pastels, but they're half sticks So I always recommend buying half sticks whenever possible for multiple reasons one is that you get double the color for your money And they're already conveniently in sizes for me anyway of how I like to paint with my pastels I actually take full sticks and Break them anyway. So I love half sticks. I will be sharing links to Literally almost all of the products that I mentioned in this video in the description section of this particular video All right, so now I'm just getting started with layering the pastels And by the way, this is the portion that I will use the alcohol on to get that loose and painterly Initial effect. I'm getting the background in with some teals and blues the foreground You could see I had some purples and blues and now with the little Um, I don't know some kind of a tray the little server thing that they're sitting on I'm really at this point just looking at value and color and for my color choices. I'm using what's called local color It's pretty much what I see in the scene But often I'll go a little bit darker, especially like for this under painting because I know I'm going to be layering other Pastels on top. So I've got a couple little colors of this Kind of pink almost coral type of pink Got in a little edge to that tray and I'm not pressing really hard just so you know. All right. Here is the alcohol It's 91% like drugstore alcohol. I have a dish to put it in And also you could use water for this if you want alcohol just dries faster I have some paper towels and my prinston round brush. It's a 40 50 r round brush I'm using a brush that's Larger than you would think I could even go larger with this But I like to keep this loose again. This is part of that painterly loose beginning And what is so neat this white pastel matte not only receives pastel beautifully It takes a lot of layers. It also receives water color any kind of water based medium And I love this particular technique because you don't have to have anything except pastels pastels Literally turn into paint when you wet them Speeding the section up you get the idea And so I'm not worried that it doesn't look super smooth. That's part of this painterly feel too And if things drip a bit, that's okay You don't want to be nuts with it and have it just dripping all over the place But uh, often noticed too, I turn my brush on its side. I just sneak it into little places where I need to And um, I'm rinsing my brush to like when I just went to that section I rinsed it off so because I didn't want too much of that pink color to get down into the bottom And so I use sometimes the brush like a literally like a paint brush I'll grab some color like in this red on the tops and I use it to paint with You know, I still have a little bit of the red on it now what I'm doing here I'm doing it in stages sometimes I'll do all of the pastels and one Uh application of alcohol in this case I decided to do my background and the little tray it's sitting on first and then let it dry And then go in and get some of my darker values now this strawberry The foreground Actually the entire foreground cupcake will be my central focal point I want this cupcake to get the main focus therefore as I'm working you will notice the background Cupcakes get less attention less detail Less value As they recede into the distance I want those background cupcakes to almost look like when you take a photograph and you get that nice fuzzy background that's actually achieved by setting your aperture correctly And they have so many things now that automatically do this stuff that I think people don't even know what's happening in the camera Now with this strawberry. Yes, the icing is white. So why would I be putting this blue down kind of a darker value? Well, if you notice there the Our brain sees the icing as white But if you really zoned in to the area where some of the icing is dripping over it And the strawberries turned away from the main light source The the white icing and the pink icing actually has some areas where there is Shadow and shadows are typically cooler So I use a little bit of blue and I think even a little bit of purple And right now all I'm doing is getting my general shapes of those dollops of frosting and What's neat about this is You want to get it accurate, but you can exaggerate it a little bit too. I even took my cupcakes I felt they were all too perfect facing exact all the strawberries were almost exactly Turned the same way. So I decided to vary kind of the way the strawberries were stuck in the top of that icing Um, so the same thing with these dollops, you know, you can keep it the same as in the photo Or you can get a little creative with it. So just continuing to work here. This will be my second application of alcohol I'm going to speed this part up because you probably got the idea from the first application And now when I add the alcohol once again, this time I will Continue to use the technique I mentioned before where I use The paintbrush and the pastels like I'm painting. See I'm grabbing some of that blue And it keeps some on the brush and I'm able to add some shadows To the areas of the frosting that are shadowy You can kind of see if you look at that front in the photograph if you look at that front cupcake The area of the frosting to the left has a little highlight on it But the middle section of that frosting is a little darker if you squint your eyes That's one of the best ways to really see value And if you're brand new and you're like, what is you talking about with value value is simply The degree of lightness or darkness something is and once you learn a few tricks you can Really represent it accurately and value is Really crucial to good painting getting your lights and darks correct and using little strategies to even change things in a photo Value typically Decreases in the distance. So I'm going to use that to my favor And you can see in the photo those background cupcakes are fuzzy. They're out of focus But I'm going to keep the value even lighter in the distance. Um, you know, I may be adding a little bit of Shadow underneath them The background cupcakes, but they won't be as dark in value In the background as the foreground now, this looks a little dark right now But I know I'm going to this is going to be my last application of alcohol I just wanted to add a little bit more dark to areas of interest and get things established before I start painting with pastel Now the color of these cupcakes is kind of like that vanilla cupcake flavor I'm normally a chocolate girl But these cupcakes look really great with these strawberries. So I'm look at that. It looks kind of messy, right? But the neat thing about pastels is you layer them That's one of the things I got I guess frustrated with when I first tried pastels Uh, by the way, I had zero pastel instruction in my life Um until I took one workshop and that's all I've ever had And that was only just a few years ago Um, so you can learn online. That's how I learned but I learned Um, originally by trial and error and one of the things that frustrated me as I was like I felt like when I made those first, um layers It was supposed to look more like a finished painting And as I learned from other artists and did a lot of research The initial layers are going to look a little bit chunky or unfinished It's as you gradually layer and learning the strategy of How to layer when to layer, you know, like I said, the differences between color and value how to combine certain colors And it may seem like a lot, but it's really not if you just start playing doing some small studies and having some fun That's how you're going to learn. Trust me. You can't make any more mistakes than I did My goal is to help you make less of them With some instruction to help you where you're having more fun early on than getting frustrated But don't worry. We all get frustrated. It happens to every artist Now you can see I've got my general little color in for the cupcake part And now I am going to do a little bit more with the alcohol mostly just getting in a Little bit of alcohol to get some values a little bit darker in certain areas once again I can layer lighter pastels on top of this that right now looks too dark But it will add Contrast and make that cupcake in the foreground more of the focal point and now it is time for Only pastels. Well, we only use pastels plus alcohol thus far But I won't be using any more alcohol now But you notice I've got just a nice Little painterly beginning with things kind of fun and gestural And I find when you sketch things out this way I've talked about this in a few of my past videos Sometimes you'll you know do a little guide or or you'll mark your paper off to get an exact sketch or drawing And while I do this when things may be a complicated subject matter or when something's very large I find that my paintings that look the most painterly The most um impressionistic are ones where I do a hand Only done sketch. I don't get any assistance. You just sketch it out From scratch so to speak and I feel it has more life And more movement and more character. So I highly recommend that I felt that's why this little piece had that It's because I just sketched it in I was having some fun Now this doesn't happen right away. You've got to work at sketching You've got to work at your skills some neat little exercises on my patreon page To help artists get better at sketching now with the little paper cups or the paper liners for the cupcakes You know back when I was first starting I would have felt like I had to get every one of these Absolutely just like the photograph But really if you just get the gesture and the idea and not have every single little Fold spelled out It's going to feel much more painterly which once again is kind of the point of this video Especially with this alcohol underpainting. I think really helps with that now. You see I use kind of that maroon color By the way, my patrons will also be getting a color guide. Typically. That's one of the little extras my patrons get I'll often take the pastels that I used in this lesson And I will make a little guide show the marks of them, which is helpful But as I always say you don't have to go out and buy this set of pastels to do this tutorial You probably have some colors and values that will work if you've been doing some pastel painting If you're not a pastel artist, I have many people leave comments and said hey, I did this in acrylic acrylic oil Wash all behave very similarly Similarly as they do with pastels because we typically work dark to light It's an opaque medium meaning you can layer lighter colors on top of darker unlike watercolor. You want to Preserve the light in watercolor. Um, I wouldn't Put down like the strawberry that's going to have a highlight on it I would have had to preserve that light area if I was using watercolor. All right I told a fib I didn't mean to tell a fib. I decided to Use some more alcohol obviously and what I'm doing is I realized I got a little bit of Dark back there and I'm kind of softening it up. I didn't want that back Cupcake to have too much dark I also kind of reshaped that one. That's a little bit behind the main cupcake And that's the neat thing with this too You want to get things basically right when you get your sketch in But you do have the freedom to somewhat correct things with edges as you lay pastels down If I see one corner needs to be curved up a little bit. I can do that by Using the negative edge to something to reshape it That's not to say that we should be haphazard with our marks Because if we over correct It causes our painting to look less fresh For one thing your painting can get muddied by having too many layers When you correct and put another color and another layer over it Your pastels don't show up as vibrantly and they become dull and muddied So if you're having that challenge with painting, it's probably because you are Continuing to correct and correct an overlayer. Okay, so yes, I did use more alcohol Um, I obviously realized that I needed a bit more dark Again, it may seem a little too dark right now But I'm going to layer these pastels on top of it and that contrast meaning dark next to light Is what's going to make this front cupcake have more Center stage get more attention and the other ones will be supporting characters And with this fork, I'm basically I just focused on angles. I looked at where things were in relation to the cupcake. I looked at my proportions my negative spaces To get the general shape and gesture of the fork without getting too fussy with it early on Have you ever done this? Have you ever focused on some object? It didn't feel just right and you fiddled and you fussed and you fussed and you fiddled and before you know it You had even lost your Mojo to paint Now I'm using my alcohol because I never used any alcohol on the fork and I'm using it again Almost to paint literally You notice the fork has a dark area at that little curve And all I'm doing is looking at shapes and values right now And I'm just getting in those basic shapes angles values Later, you'll see me come back and work more on Uh refining the fork, but at the same time, I don't want to refine it too much because It's not the focal point. It can lead the eye in have a little bit of interest But that front cupcake is indeed the star all I'm doing now What was down before was the alcohol wash underpainting and uh while it was nice and impressionistic I wanted to give it a little more color and soften it up a bit. All right. Now. Here's what's neat I'm coming in here with these unison pastels and this particular Pastel is it's kind of like a gray And It's not super white. Remember said the frosting in our brains. It's white But what I'm doing is I'm coming in with this Uh, I would say a darker white. Okay, and I'm layering down where some of the frosting is Um on the strawberries Knowing that I'm going to add lighter Highlights on top. So start with the Darker like a gray a taupe or you know, or even a blue Uh value when I say darker, I mean dark dark, but darker than white to pure white I don't even use pure white in this whole painting But put down your kind of shadowy color first And what I was going to say is neat about these unison pastels They are arranged so beautifully in their palette the way they come They have um, not only color families, they have them layered according to value So I know after I use that one I can go to the one immediately next to it, which is this one It's a little bit lighter and I can add some of those highlights of the frosting It it's almost like it's a drizzle this neat drizzle that kind of curves this over the strawberry and over some of the frosting So I'm just making some little gestural curves and then after I get these Marks in then I'll go back with my lightest light at the very end I go back with an even lighter light just on that front strawberry again to give it the most attention So, you know, just making some little marks general shapes and ideas of where this frosting is And uh working my darker to lighter concept in mind I'll speed up this little section Basically the same thing I've been talking about layering the lighter Values on top of the slightly darker values and you can see I'm just getting that little gestural feel with this pastel this just a tad lighter Of the frosting just drizzling over and you want to make sure you use these directional strokes Like I'm curving over the strawberry. It's going to give it that three-dimensional feel Um and pretty soon. I think I'll actually be using an even lighter pastel to get those highlights on the frosting Enjoy while I continue to work to some lovely music, but don't worry I'll be back actually when I go to enhance that strawberry on the top of the foreground Cupcake, I'm going to give it a little more contrast and color and make it really stand out. Okay. Enjoy the music Hopefully you can see how I just gradually add layer and color until it starts to take shape And now I've zoomed in so you can see me working on the strawberry I'm working on the strawberry seeds and that little dark area right there That's kind of underneath the frosting you can see in the photo. It is darker Now with strawberry seeds, basically you put your dark divot in like the seed Then you work a little bit of the next value. That was just kind of a cool red And then you add the lighter values Actually, this is a little highlight that's on the strawberry and I'm using a blue rather than a white But basically the dark seeds are being pushed in so there would be a shadow Then you've got your middle value reds and then your lightest reds are on those parts of the strawberry that are Not pushed in basically So and this part of the strawberry is obviously going to be lighter because it's not down underneath the frosting I am using my artistic license to make the strawberries even a bit more red Or pinkish and make them show up a little bit more now I added a little dark there because I know I'm going to add the little Leaves coming off the strawberry. So I wanted some contrast or a base Adding a little bit of a highlight underneath this. It's not going to stay that dark But that's going to ground that front So that it feels like it's really three-dimensional and sitting on the surface there. All right, so I'm making some more little shapes of seeds and also too seeds strawberry seeds and flower petals and many things in nature have a pattern And if you've seen my video on the Fibonacci sequence or the golden ratio, it's often called There is a pattern that is found throughout nature And it's really quite fascinating and I was able to see the pattern on these seeds how they They almost have a diagonal way that they go up and around So pay attention. You don't have to know all that stuff about the Fibonacci sequence, but pay attention to How they're turned and And the placement of the seeds. It's going to make your strawberry look more realistic I've zoomed in even further here so that you can see a little bit more about when I use the lightest light Now this is like, uh, it's a new pastel. It's uh one similar that I used to make the sketch See how I'm putting the light on the areas that are the highest part of the strawberry And now I'm going to add the little leaves coming off of the strawberry keeping the same gesture that's in the photo I liked how they were kind of curled back. They had a nice, uh, little gestural quality to them Once again the same strategy of putting the darker color down first because I know With this pastel matte paper I can layer color and that's where you really get the beauty of Painting with soft pastels and now I've got my lightest green and just a few certain areas and by the way this pastel matte It's quite, um deceiving Actually, I thought the first time I got it it would have more of a sanded surface like other sanded pastel papers Like you are fissure Um senelier, they feel like hardware store sandpaper The pastel matte is actually a lot smoother than some of those other Papers and yet it still takes a decent amount of layers. It's pretty awesome stuff I'm speeding up the fork portion and I'll add some music It's it's not that long because I want to give more real time on actually putting more frosting on these strawberries I'm trying to keep my file size Not too large. Some of you know if you've been with my saga through the years with monnaie cafe I am still living, uh, kind of in a temporary home situation. I mean my husband and I have made it Awesome. I mean I like my little farmhouse, but uh when our house flooded back in 2017 We had to move into a property that we had that wasn't our Um goal to be our final property But that long explanation to share that I have very slow wi-fi out here in the country and There's just literally no options to getting any faster wi-fi So I try to keep my videos under 40 minutes or it's just not real manageable So I'm just beating up the fork section and I'm adding some little highlights on the ends And this is where I was saying I I didn't get overly fussy with the fork at the beginning because I didn't want it to steal my energy And now I can focus on just getting it just enough I don't want the fork to steal the attention from the cupcake. So I'm just getting little shapes getting a little shimmer I did like the fact that it was gold. So, you know, now I've talked long enough to where I'm not going to have to add any music So, um, I did want the little shadow underneath the fork because that's going to make it also like the cupcake grounded Give it that three-dimensional feel. All right. Now. This is real time And it's the same strategy. I mentioned before where I have reserved my Use of the lightest Value this it looks like white. It's really like a super light blue. I believe it's in that That row like I said how the unison has their pastels so beautifully arranged by color and value It's the lightest light if I think the row of blue now I'm adding a little bit of this grayish taupey color because I noticed in the reference photo The the frosting that's dripping to the front there kind of over the cupcake It's still a little bit more in shadow. So I'm going to use the slightly darker value to get that in and then I'll add just little bits of lightest value in strategic areas Now with this frosting I'm using the photo as a gauge I do like how you can tell it's Draping over the areas that are kind of humped like the cupcake and some of the frosting So you want to make sure you get that little curve or it's just it's not going to be believable also, I am using the frosting or the photo as a guide as to where the The drizzles are but it's not a hard and fast item, you know, like placing an eye correct on a portrait So I get a little creative with kind of how much and where I put some of the the drizzles And then I will add again. I'm still working with this. See how it's slightly darker I don't know if you can tell on your screen I'm looking back at my reference photo a lot to make sure I get the curves right And then once I get that right, I've got my Little gauge or my guide and I know where I'm going to put the lightest lights But see how I kind of humped it over the actual frosting And once I have that established I can add my lightest lights I noticed the frosting actually had these little it looked like white sprinkles Other than just the drizzles. So I added a few little like little balls little sprinkles on there and This part was fun The most fun was doing the little Drizzles on the background strawberries because they were so Subdued and suggestive. I didn't have to be quite this careful But uh, this was literally the icing on the cake. I promise you I didn't plan that little uh cliche there But it truly is part of the painting that makes it so fun You know this little drizzles on it. It it wouldn't have looked the same without that So this was such a fun painting for me. I did most of it early morning. I did it Well started it I think last night and then I finished it this morning But it was just a fun painting and I hope you try it I hope you have fun as you paint and my patrons, you know, if you're a patron of mine on my patreon page It's so wonderful because we have a homework album and when my patrons Do something from one of my lessons if they share their work in the home homework album. I get to see it I also have a private facebook group for my patrons. So they share and mingle in there I have a discord group that's more for my patrons just to chat they help each other they ask a lot of questions But you can also do that on the mone cafe art group on facebook That is just you just ask to become a member you answer a few questions and there are over 14 000 members in that group So that's a really great resource as well. My patrons is just a little bit more intimate and I get to engage with you guys more So um and if you're not a patron of mine and you'd like to share the work feel free I ask that you do give credit to uh the mone cafe channel or me as an artist And if you share it on instagram or social media, I'd love for you to tag me. I've been enjoying that I'll get a little notification that somebody tagged me and I can see a painting that you did From one of the hundreds of tutorials on mone cafe. By the way on instagram I am found and you can follow me at susan jinkins artist all one word And on facebook my page not the group the mone cafe group my my page is The art of susan jinkins So feel free to find me and follow me and all of that I love how things have been growing over the years And it's really just such a blessing. I have to thank the lord. I gave my art to the lord many years ago And uh, he's just been so faithful. So This is the part I said was fun doing these little drips on the background ones because I just got to Give some real neat gestural marks. It was indeed fun and creative and here is the final It is just so yummy looking and now I want some cupcakes I'm gonna go make some cupcakes, but I'm enjoying the market theme in mone cafe It's a lot of fun and this original painting is available in my etsy shop This is where I sell my original artwork And sometimes they sell kind of quickly after a video like this But as long as it's there you can check it out or find some other artwork I also have many of my paintings available as prints and other products on my fine art america account They do a great job. Whether you get something framed or you just have a canvas print So you guys bless me and I am so grateful for my subscribers If you haven't subscribed, I hope you will and I am grateful for each and every one of you All right guys. Happy painting and be blessed